Oman, the largest Arab oil producer not in OPEC, will sign four agreements with international companies to develop crude and boost output from its current level of 884,900 barrels a day, a government official said.

Oil production rose 2.3 percent last year from an average of 864,600 barrels a day in 2010, and all the country’s fields should produce more this year, said Nasser bin Khamis al-Jashmi, undersecretary of the Oil and Gas Ministry.

Oman’s output of natural gas increased by 4.4 percent in 2011 to 95.1 million cubic meters, and the ministry’s target for this year is 99 million cubic meters, al-Jashmi told a news conference in the Omani capital Muscat yesterday.

Oman holds the seventh-biggest reserves of crude and natural gas in the Middle East, according to data from BP Plc. The country awarded oil-drilling rights last year for the new areas it wants to develop.

Petroleum Development Oman, the country’s largest oil producer, is pumping from 540,000 to 560,000 barrels a day, Raoul Restucci, the company’s managing director, said in an interview at the conference. Some of PDO’s fields contain heavy crude that requires specialized production technology and will probably show tangible results in the next two years, he said.

Al-Jashmi estimated that Oman’s Khazzan and Makarem gas fields will produce some 1.2 billion cubic feet of commercial quantities of the fuel.